Monday, March 31, 2014

After several years, and after approximately 1,600 posts, today I've decided it's time to retire from writing this little blog.

There are several reasons. One, and the most important one for me anyway, is that it seems that the more negative posts I do on either on Google, or Android, the less hits I seem to get. I'm not saying that Google is deliberately attempting to censor my blog or anything, but I've noticed that I have dropped from around 800 to 900 visitors per day to around a measly two or three! In other words: "What's the point?"

Another reason is that I simply do not have the time. I'm going back to writing other things, including a possible new blog on children's books, since, after all, that is what I've been trained professionally to do. I may also write for other tech sites like I have done in the past, and, who knows?, I might even do an occasional post, here-and-there, right here... all just for the fun of it, of course.

So, in conclusion, my one-or-two dear readers, many thanks for stopping by over the years, as I've really appreciated you dropping by, so take care, and so long.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

First introduced in Japan as an alternative to text-based emoticons, Emoj' shave become ubiquitous in messaging as they can much better convey emotions, because, as they say, "a picture is better than 10,000 words." Most emoji human characters, however, seem to be of a caucasian background so after wondering why, the publication MTV Act appealed directly to Apple's Tim Cook and yesterday they received his reply via Katie Cotton, an Apple representative which stated:

"Tim forwarded your email to me. We agree with you. Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard."

Apple's current emojis list consists of mostly of smiley faces, foods, plants and symbols and some are concerned at the distinct lack of ethnic diversity, even though there are some generic representations, including Chinese, Indians and Russians, but no other races.

Others have noted, however, that in Apple's last emoji it included same-sex couples and their families into the fold as part of iOS 6.

In conclusion, I've always loved emoji's as they graphically can convey emotions so much better than mere words and I'm looking forward to Apple updating them.